The Chosen Other
by Shin Willow
Summary: Xander chose the Matrix.


Title: The Chosen Other 

Author: Shin Willow.

Spoilers: None probably.

Category: Drama

Rating: PG

Author's Note: Always bothered me how Morpheus and his people, and the agents, basically have licenses to kill anyone.

Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or the characters from the Matrix.

Giles is always mad at me. He didn't even try and pretend he liked me anymore. There wasn't his usual tolerance towards me for Buffy and Willow's sake, just... Giles doesn't like me. And I'm cool with that. I think before everything happened it would have bothered me to know without a doubt Giles despised me. I mean I kinda always knew he thought I was a screw-up, but I also thought he cared about me. If for no other reason than Buffy did.

Well... Buffy was dead. So's Wills. Dawn went to go live with her dad, she calls Giles, I think. She hasn't said word one to me in a year. Spike. He followed Dawn to LA. I wonder if he looks up Deadboy. Don't really care. More than obvious even to a bonehead like me those girls were the only thing G-man and I had in common. I swear if it wasn't for our mission, The Mission, Giles wouldn't have anything to do with me, he'd be in England somewhere getting drunk instead of sitting up in his bedroom getting drunk. Cursing me, cursing them, cursing the whole freaky world.

He's teaching me magic. Real magic, the good stuff and the bad. He figures at this point our souls fall by the wayside. I have to agree we're so full of the need for revenge it's almost like I can't even remember the last time Giles and I weren't working on our strategy to kill an untold amount of people. The guilty. 

I think Giles wants to be the one to fight our enemies. He thinks I'm going to screw it up. But despite all his smarts and flexible grasp on reality, Giles doesn't got what it takes to take on what's ahead. He's too set in his ways, he lacks the imagination. I remember the first time we fought after discovering the big truth and the rules to our brave new world. Or the stunning absence of them.

Giles was a trained Watcher. He said he was skilled in many forms of martial arts and weapons. He should have been able to take me though he's like twice my age. But I totally got it; the world made sense to me in a way it never had before. I moved. I was faster and stronger, Giles might as well been standing still. I don't get it sometimes how a guy who believed in all sorts of outlandish stuff like magic, slayers, and oracles finds it so hard to believe we live in an artificial world run by machines. A world without limits. Okay, I would have had problems myself if not for that day. The day Buffy and Willow had their lives snuffed out like they were nothing. And to them I guess Buffy and Wills was exactly that: nothing. Just cannon fodder or collateral damage. Maybe didn't even have that much value.

Giles hates that I spend every second I'm not learning magic planted in front of the TV watching movie after movie. Cartoon after cartoon, or so Giles calls them. One day I'm gonna tell him the difference betwixt anime and cartoons. Bugs and Daffy are cartoons, Akira is anime. And when Giles finally sees what I'm getting out of immersing myself in this stuff he'll understand. I have a good imagination, can't count the thousands of a fantasy I've indulged in about having super powers like my friends, but that's all they were, flights of fancy. I might have wanted to be a bigger player in the slaying but I also liked being regular ol' me. No easy task I tell you, learning to like myself and who I was, limitations and all. But now it was different. I needed to take my fantasies and bring them to the fore. Make them real in a world that suddenly made it possible to make them real. And where my imagination fails I'll have dozens of other resources at my disposal, with endless means of attack and defense our enemies won't see coming. It'll be poetic too, given how they discount all that has been created here, dismiss this world in favor of theirs.

The hard part will be finding them, of course. It was bad, bad luck I learned of their secret existence and survived the encounter. I laughed once in front of Giles telling him it would be funny if after all we've gone through we never see the bastards again. He punched me. Giles never did appreciate my Xanderfied humor.

I will find them. And I'll kill them all. Giles doesn't understand that yet, what I'm going to do to these people. If he did I wonder if he'd try and talk me down, tell me to keep it professional, cold, passionless. Because never mind all his drunken bad moods and pain over Buffy's death, Giles is still the man he was before. A kind, decent man who can find the humanity in this situation, this world. He still believes in limits. Well, good for him, I don't. They blew their heads off... Willow's chest exploded into a ground beef when the bullets tore into her. Buffy's brains got in my mouth...

When this is all over I think I'll be the strongest person in the world. I don't know what I'll do then. Giles is going back to the land of fish and chips, tea and scones. Do whatever Englishmen do there. Me? I realize slaying doesn't hold as much significance to me anymore. I can keep the Hellmouth closed with just my will alone, but the vampires and demons? I'm not even sure they're the threat we thought they were. If they weren't created to maintain a balance no one understands yet. If the machines fashioned them, or something else did. Which figures, now that I have the means to actually fight the things that go bump in the night I'm not sure I should. If Spike and Angel could see me now...


End file.
